RLP 281: Civil Marriage Records

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 281 Civil Marriage Records Welcome to research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA, join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go Hi, everyone Welcome to research Like a Pro.

Nicole (45s):
Today’s episode is brought to you by find agra.com. The best place to search online for burial information for your family, friends, and famous people. Hi mom, how are you?

Diana (55s):
I’m great. How are you? Nicole?

Nicole (57s):
Doing great. I’m just really enjoying reading all of the research projects from our study group and giving feedback. It’s so neat to learn about other people’s research and different locations. I just learned some really neat things today about Irish naming patterns. I had heard that was a big thing, but the way that the person had written it up, she included a lot of detail and times when there might be disruptions to the naming conventions if somebody died and they’re honoring that person by naming their children after them. It was just really comprehensive. And I learned a lot.

Diana (1m 26s):
Yeah, reading other people’s research is such a fabulous way to learn. Yeah.

Nicole (1m 30s):
What have you been doing?

Diana (1m 31s):
Well, I finished up my Klein project and wrote the report and that was such a good experience. Made a couple of new discoveries and hypotheses, but then my next phase is adding DNA. so I decided I would see if I could find that mitochondrial DNA test taker who would be a descendant of Mahalo Klein and I’m hypothesizing Mahalo and clumsy our sisters. And I’ve got my cousin who’s the appropriate person to test for mitochondrial for clumsy line. So what I ended up doing was looking at this family mahala and Thomas Shockley on FamilySearch and did a descendancy tree view of four generations and then just looked for daughters, daughters, daughters going out and came across a family who had a lot of daughters and any one of them would be a good candidate for testing and then found the obituary of one of them and kind of put together this little family.

Diana (2m 24s):
So I have a good candidate, which is exciting. Now I just need to reach out and see if she would be interested in taking a task. so I, think I’m going to do a little writeup on family Locket You know how we’ll do a page about our projects so that I can just send a link to that and there are a couple other people I might reach out to as well and say, here are the reports, here’s what I’m trying to do. Would you be interested in being part of this study? Anyway, I have a good path forward for that.

Nicole (2m 51s):
I’m excited. We already have the mitochondrial results for the cousin who’s the descendant of Clumsy, right?

Diana (2m 58s):
Yes. That is all ready to go. So now I just need to find another one and You know if I find that it still doesn’t really tell us who the mother would be, I would hope that I, this would tell me that they were sisters and have the same mother and it might not, they might not have the same mother. I mean we You know we don’t know. So.

Nicole (3m 16s):
Right. I guess if it’s not a match, that would be helpful because then you could rule that out or you could look for a non parental event in the line and if it is a match then it supports the hypothesis, but you still have to have a body of evidence. Right. Because it could be that their actual common Ancestors a thousand years back and not that

Diana (3m 35s):
Close. Exactly. That’s exactly right. So I’m also gathering autosomal DNA evidence. And I found a good DNA match who was also coming through this Mahala Klein Shockley to my mitochondrial DNA test taker. So And I found a lot of shared matches between the two that I think are creating a network for clients. So that’s exciting too, to see autosomal backing up what I hope will be my conclusion. Cool. Anyway, I’m excited. Well, let’s do some announcements. We have our Research Like, a Pro Webinar series final Webinar of the Year, coming up on Tuesday December 19th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time.

Diana (4m 17s):
And this one is titled Proving the Mother of Cornelia Roberson Hickerson ADNA case study presented by Candy er. So we’re excited to learn from candy. And then we have our next Research Like, a Pro DNA study group beginning in February of 2024. If you’re interested in leading a small group of peers, our peer group leader application is on the website and you get the opportunity to do the study group free of charge and enjoy getting to know your peers and seeing their projects and helping them along. And then as always, please join our newsletter for coupons in the latest podcasts and Blog posts episodes so that you can keep up to date with what we’re doing on Family Locket.

Nicole (5m 2s):
Well, today we’re talking about marriage records and specifically Civil Marriage Records. In the last episode when we talked about marriage records, it was episode 274 and we talked about Church Marriage Records and how to find them Church. Marriage Records are relatively common and easy to find in Europe, but in the United States it’s much easier to find Civil Marriage Records. And part of the reason for this is that church records are private while Civil Marriage Records are public and easier to access. Here in my family tree, I have Civil Marriage Records for almost all my Ancestors in the first four generations. These are typically found at the county level.

Nicole (5m 42s):
Many, many counties began keeping marriage records by 1900 and some started even earlier than that.

Diana (5m 49s):
Well, let’s just go through some examples of different types of these Civil Marriage Records. One of the things that you’ll often see is a marriage license and a return. And there’s an example from Utah County and they recorded these in a county marriage record book. We always wanna look at that source to try to figure out who is doing the recording. And in this example, it appears that the clerk of the county probate court filled out the entire marriage record and he copied it from the marriage return. So we want to always look at the handwriting and that can help us a lot. And in this case, the handwriting is consistent throughout the whole record.

Diana (6m 30s):
But in contrast, a marriage record from Lubbock County, Texas shows two different sets of handwriting and that indicated that the return was likely filled out by the person who performed the marriage. And often the county marriage record book is all that remains of the original records created at the marriage because these types of marriage records were held in the county courthouse over the years, they have been well preserved and are available for Genealogists to research family searches microfilmed and digitized most of the US County courthouse records and made them available in the FamilySearch Library catalog. And many are indexed and included as part of their database.

Diana (7m 12s):
so I always think it’s so interesting to think about the original marriage record and for one of my collateral couples, I contacted the county and they mailed me the actual record that they had. Not in the book, but it was the paper copy And I. Don’t know if the couple never came back to get that. I don’t know how the county courthouse had that. But anyway, I have that original copy, which is kind of cool. They’re not even my direct line, but it’s always interesting to contact the county and see what is out there.

Nicole (7m 47s):
For sure. It’s interesting to hear about what papers the county has kept and which ones they just decided we don’t need these papers. We have it recorded in the register. And then to also think about the fact that sometimes like the priest or whoever was doing the marriage would give them like a church certificate for their records and things like that. So there’s just a lot of different papers and different types of records. In this Blog post I had written that most of the US County Courthouse records have been digitized, but as I have been learning about some other jurisdictions in the last few weeks, I realized that most of the ones that I use have been digitized in the south. But a lot of the counties in the West I think have less things on FamilySearch digitized.

Nicole (8m 33s):
I don’t know if this is something you’ve noticed too, but I’ve just noticed that in the south and the older states and the older counties where they do have a lot of historical records and and things like that, those ones are more likely to be digitized.

Diana (8m 47s):
That’s interesting. I certainly have noticed that different counties, even in in the South, I’ve gone to counties before and been disappointed to see, see very few records that have been digitized, which could just be because one FamilySearch went into that area, perhaps the person at the courthouse didn’t make everything available. You know, we’re really just reliant on who will let you digitize the records.

Nicole (9m 11s):
Yeah. One of my friends was saying she had to do a lot of courthouse research in one county in Illinois and also in Idaho, because I can’t remember which one of those counties, but one of them had said they didn’t like the way FamilySearch was going to digitize them, so they were gonna do them themselves. Hmm. And then they never did.

Diana (9m 28s):
Yeah, exactly. Well, I know FamilySearch is always looking for those types of collections to digitize. So if anyone listening has a county that You know has not been digitized or has a lot more records, You know, let us know. We can give you the contact person at FamilySearch to get that done because they do want to have a comprehensive collection as much as possible. And it’s impossible for them to know every single little area throughout the world that has records. So they need our help.

Nicole (9m 59s):
Right. Yeah, I know they have a team dedicated to working on that and it’s really cool how much progress they’ve made in getting all those things digitized. Right. Well, our sponsor today is find a grave.com. Find a grave is the ultimate online destination to cover burial information and cemetery details for family, friends, and famous people. Finding the graves of your Ancestors has never been easier. You can create virtual memorials at photos of headstones and auto, your loved ones with virtual flowers. Find a Graves. User friendly search features allow you to explore by name, location, cemetery, date, and more. Their dedicated community of members continually adds new information, so it’s worth searching again, if you haven’t found what you are looking for, want to be part of the find a grave community, download the free app, visit your local cemetery and contribute missing grave information.

Nicole (10m 48s):
It’s a rewarding way to spend time outdoors while helping others find the burial locations of their loved ones. So next we’re going to talk about making citations for records in bound marriage books. And this is the very common type of marriage record to be found in a county courthouse. Often the county courthouses will have books called Marriages volume 1, 2, 3, and those volumes will have the record of the marriage returns or the marriage licenses, the registrations and that kind of thing. In evidence explained, you can go to section 9.4, which begins on page 434 of the third edition.

Nicole (11m 28s):
And there are several examples there for marriage licenses and registrations in a bound volume. So when you’re creating a reference note citation for a marriage record in a bound marriage record book kept at the county or town level, evidence explained suggests leading with the name of the jurisdiction who created the record. So that will answer the question who created the record? In most cases, this is the county or the town. And this can be confusing because when we say who, sometimes our minds go to the person recording it. So like the county clerk or the person who performed the marriage and then wrote it down. But we’re actually thinking of the entity that required the creation of that record.

Nicole (12m 10s):
And so usually that’s the county or the town. So let’s use the marriage license of Charles Kreer and Mary Peterson from Utah County, Utah as an example, and we’ll go through and create a citation for that marriage record. So the entity that created or caused to be created, this record is Utah County, and at the time when they were married, it was Utah Territory. And on the marriage record it actually says Territory of Utah. So that’s what I’m going to use for the citation. So we’re going to start the citation by saying Utah County Territory of Utah, this marriage record is in a set of digitized records with multiple volumes on the same digitized microfilm.

Nicole (12m 55s):
So sometimes you need to zoom out and look at all the images so that you can see how they are organized. Often the book cover or the spine is filmed making it easier to determine the name or number of the volume. In this case, the book cover or spine was not filmed, but the first image of each new section did have a handwritten note about the volume number and the years it covered. so I went back to image 202, and that looks like the, it’s the start of the images for this section and it says marriage license record at the top, and it says number 1 18 88 to 1892. so I surmised that this meant volume one covering the years 1888 to 1892.

Nicole (13m 36s):
Then I went forward in time on image 522, and that appears to mark the start of volume two of the marriage license record and includes the year 1892 to 97. Then the beginning of the loose papers with an index by the groom’s surname stated it was for book number two. so I think I was right with my assumptions there. So with that information in hand, I decided to create my citation using the numbered volumes format. And as it shows in evidence, explain 9.4. The way that you do that is by putting the number of the marriage license record volume a colon, and then the page number, so to add to our citation that starts out Utah County Territory of Utah.

Nicole (14m 18s):
We then have a description of what it is, and it’s marriage license record one 408. 408 is the page number within that volume. So this is all part of the physical layer about this marriage record book

Diana (14m 34s):
You know that’s so great that you’ve got that physical layer laid out with that actual page number of the marriage license record because if for some strange reason the image numbers get changed, you’ve got that physical number and if you wanted to go into the county courthouse and look at this book, you’d be able to find it. And that’s what our goal is to be able to find it physically. And then of course we’re going to add the digital information here as well, but I think that’s one of the things we sometimes get a little confused on is how to find that physical information, how to find that volume number, and then getting the page number recorded just depends on the digitization, how that’s organized or the microfilming in this case, I guess.

Diana (15m 18s):
So good job.

Nicole (15m 19s):
Yeah, it makes it so easy viewing the digitized microfilm to zoom out and see how it’s organized and see the front matter for each section of images. So next we need to find the names of the bride in the groom and their date of marriage and put that in our citation. So if the names of the bride in the groom are not common enough to have other people of that surname married that year, you can simply include their surnames like Career Peterson. But I usually just like to include the full name since I didn’t wanna look through all of the marriage records and see how common their names are. So evidence explain suggests also using the marriage date and the citation if the year of the marriage register is not included in the name of the series.

Nicole (16m 3s):
So given those two options, I opted to use the year of the marriage, it just seems like a good thing to include. So the next part of our citation will be Charles c Kreer and Mary M. Peterson, 23 March, 1892. And that is the end of our physical layer. So we end that with a semicolon and that indicates that the next section is a different layer of viewing that record and it’s going to be our digital layer. So the first thing to do in the digital layer is to identify the format, which is an image online and the website where it was found, which is FamilySearch.

Nicole (16m 45s):
In the evidence explained style, we always italicize the titles of publications like books, journals, newspapers, and websites. And following the title of the website, we put the URL of the website in parentheses. So you can choose to include just the main URL of the site, like FamilySearch dot org or the full URL that includes the exact way to get to that image. And I like to include the full URL since FamilySearch uses archival URLs indicated by the ARK, and that just makes it so much easier to get back to the record. For anyone reading my report, an archival URL usually means that the URL will not change over time.

Nicole (17m 31s):
So it’s a great URL. I like to remove everything after the question mark so that it’s shorter than the next thing is a space, a colon, a space. And then the access date. Sometimes I’ll include the image number of the digitized microfilm. This is usually just helpful for myself when I’m browsing through different images in the set to learn how it’s arranged to remember, oh, which image do I need to go back to. so I will usually include that in my notes. So the digital layer of our citation says image online comma FamilySearch, which is italicized parentheses, and then the full URL space colon space axis six, July, 2023, and parentheses image 4 22 of 8 0 8.

Nicole (18m 18s):
The final layer is separated by another semicolon and it’s the source of the source information. If you want to learn more about layered citations, including the source of the source information, you can go read about it in evidence explained 2.33. Basically this is the information the website provides about where they got the images. Sometimes that’s the family history library film number, and sometimes it’s the county office and location. The digitized images include a paper at the front of each section from the office of the Utah County Clerk certifying that they allowed the digitization of the images and the letterhead included the place as Provo, Utah. so I used that in my source of the source line.

Nicole (18m 59s):
So the last part of the citation reads citing the Office of the Utah County Clerk Provo, Utah.

Diana (19m 6s):
All right, so Civil Marriage Records can also lead to Church Marriage Records, which is wonderful. Civil Marriage Records usually will state who performed the marriage. And this little detail can help you locate the church marriage record, which may contain more information than the civil record. They might have both sets of parents. You just never know until you check. So the marriage record we’ve been talking about for our Ancestors Charles Kanara, Mary Margaret Peterson was a civil marriage record, but it notes that they were married by an Elder of the church of Jesus Christ, of Latter-Day Saints in Manti San Pete County, Utah in 1892.

Diana (19m 47s):
And if You know the history of the area, you will know that they were almost certainly married in the Manti temple, which had opened in 1888. So if these little details on the marriage certificate can lead you to research in temple marriage records for the Manti Temple, and these records are not online, but you can go to the FamilySearch library and view the microfilms if the individuals are not living Temple Records for Living individuals are restricted, but can be accessed in the FamilySearch special collections by members. And you would just look at the FamilySearch Wiki under Temple records to learn more about that. So this is a restriction by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and other churches have similar restrictions on their marriage records.

Diana (20m 34s):
For example, you can look in the FamilySearch Wiki about Roman Catholic Church records in the United States, and you just have to track those down and figure out how you can access them. And that’s part of our job as Genealogists. So let’s look at another example in the marriage record for my grandparents, Eddie Bell Harris and Charles Leslie Schultz, the person who performed their marriage wasn’t identified by his title, only his name, WE Johnson. And this was a very simple records. There were no details about where they were married, whether it was a county, a place, a church, or a home. But one of the things we can do is research the person who performed the marriage.

Diana (21m 18s):
And so looking before and after that marriage record, we can see if the same person comes up. And many other officials were listed by Reverend or Minister of the Gospel. And WE Johnson never was listed by anything other than his name. So perhaps he was a justice of the peace and searching for him. In the 1920 and 1930, censuses found a William E. Johnson, but with the occupation of auctioneer. So looking@newspapers.com, founded article Title w Johnson. Thanks voters for their support. And although the article doesn’t explicitly state the public office, w Johnson was elected to, it seems certain that he wasn’t a minister of the gospel and it’s much more likely that he was a justice of the peace.

Diana (22m 8s):
And then there’s another article from March, 1922 titled, Colonel We Johnson Enters Race for Justice of the Peace, which confirms that hypothesis. And the article also stated he was an auctioneer and was running in Precinct one. So how fun to do the research on the person who performed the marriage and just learn a little bit more.

Nicole (22m 31s):
Yeah, that was really a fun thing to do. I hadn’t really done that before, but it was interesting to kind of put together his identity, the fact that he was an auctioneer and the fact that he lived in Precinct one, which makes me think that that’s probably where Eddie Belle and Leslie lived,

Diana (22m 45s):
Right? You know. That’s just such a great example, a fan club research and learning a little bit more, putting a little bit more context. So some s Civil Marriage Records can lead to Church, Marriage Records and others will just show that the couple was married by a justice of the peace. And often you’ll see a JP before or after the name. And so that gives you the clue right there. Or sometimes you have to go and do research and that’s Nicole did in the newspapers. And if you do see that they were married at the courthouse or by a justice of the peace, there’s going to be no church marriage record because they weren’t married at the church.

Nicole (23m 22s):
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about a marriage license application and an attached license and certificate. So sometimes you’ll find different formats of marriage records like this one. My paternal great-grandparents were from Preston, Idaho, but were married in Salt Lake City, Utah. They applied for a license to marry in Salt Lake County, and their marriage is recorded there. This is the opposite of the situation mentioned before with Charles Kreer and Mary Peterson, where they applied for a license in their home county and got married outside the county. So in this case, Austin or Hollingsworth and Blanche Merrill were from Preston, Idaho, went to Salt Lake County, got the license there, and it’s recorded there.

Nicole (24m 5s):
This marriage record is unique because it includes the application for the license to marry the application includes much more information than the actual license and return. It’s wonderful. It includes the bride and groom’s birthdate and place their occupations, their parents’ names, and their parents’ birthplaces and nationalities. So this is a really neat one

Diana (24m 26s):
That’s really fun to look at and see all the different questions. That’s kind of the thing you’re always searching for when looking at for marriage records, right? All that good information that’s so often we don’t get another records. So good job tracking that down. Well, another example is a marriage intention in a town register. So for Nicole’s sixth great grandparents on her father’s side, Isaac Brown and Lydia Engles, they were married in Andover, Massachusetts. And their marriage caused the town of Andover to create two records. So the first was under the title, intentions of Marriages entered in a volume titled Birth Marriage Deaths and Intentions 1701 to 1800.

Diana (25m 14s):
And the 1789 section had the following simple statement. It just says September 25th, Isaac Brown of Hilton and Lydia Engles of Andover. And the pages are filled with couples who had the intent to marry each with just one line so you don’t get much detail, just names and a date and a place. And then we have a record that on 28 January, 1790, Isaac Brown and Lydia Ingles were married and the marriage record was recorded in the same Volume. Nicole also found that the marriage was recorded in a separate Volume of marriages. Both of these entries were short and lacked a lot of the detail we hoped for from later records.

Diana (25m 58s):
However, these town registers often include much more helpful information than other counties, especially at this early of a date. So as you can tell from the title and over kept track of births and deaths beginning early in the 17 hundreds. And so this is always exciting when we find these town registers that were so typical in new England records. And because we have a lot of people of the same name, when we can put together families and track people back through these registers, that can really help us to find out more about our Ancestors.

Nicole (26m 34s):
Yes, it’s so wonderful. Well, our last example is a marriage record from England. And this is the example of my third great grandmother’s sister, Elizabeth Miller. And she got married to Charles Gregory in Durer. The marriage took place May 14th, 1857. So in England, the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1836 and Civil Marriage Act of 1836 provided for the creation of the General register’s office. Beginning the next year, births, marriages and deaths were recorded civilly instead of only by the parishes of the Anglican Church. The Marriage Act allowed couples to marry outside of the Anglican Church, then have their marriage recorded with the general register’s office.

Nicole (27m 19s):
Prior to this time only, those married according to the rights of the Anglican Church, Quakers and Jews were allowed to be married legally. This caused some marriages to go unrecorded, clandestine marriages to be performed and non-conformist. Church records weren’t accepted in court as legal documents to prove lines of dissent for property rights. With the creation of the civil registration in 1836, much more consistency was achieved with the recording of births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales. One of the special characteristics of these marriage records is that they include the bride and groom’s father’s names. This can be enormously helpful in determining if you have the correct person and tracing their line further back in time.

Nicole (28m 1s):
One of the challenges of these marriage records is determining which registration district to look in. The registration districts were not the same as Anglican parishes in this marriage record, Elizabeth Miller was married in the parish church at Tides well in Durer County. England Tides well was part of the Bakewell Union Registration District. A great resource to help with determining the civil registration district for a particular parish is the FamilySearch Map website available at FamilySearch dot org slash map p. This interactive map is titled England Jurisdictions 1851. It’s so helpful if you type in a place in England, it will help you determine the jurisdictions for that location.

Nicole (28m 45s):
And this is how I always use the map to help me figure out the jurisdictions for a parish. Once you have an idea of which civil registration district the couple may have been married in, you can search the birth marriage and death indexes@freebmd.org.uk. Alright, well I hope these marriage record examples were helpful to you. And if you haven’t found all the marriage records for your first four generations, that might be a fun afternoon project for you. So you can go annotate your fan chart like I did in this Blog post with which type of records of marriage were found for each couple. You may not find some for some of your Ancestors.

Nicole (29m 25s):
One, I could only find an index and wasn’t able to get the original, but most of them I had Civil, Marriage, Records. So good luck finding your Civil, Marriage Records. Alright,

Diana (29m 36s):
Thanks for listening everyone, and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-Bye

Nicole (29m 40s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro at D on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at family Locket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.